Adventures in reading
Today, The Friday Project publish Caroline Smailes‘s latest book, 99 Reasons Why. It’s an ebook (available for Kindle and iPhone/iPad/iPod touch) with eleven possible endings: nine are available within the book itself; one is being handwritten by the author and auctioned for charity; and the other is being published on various blogs — including this one. You can find it below.
I keep hearing Frances Hardinge’s name mentioned as a YA fantasy writer whose work is of interest to adult readers; here’s my chance to judge for myself. Twilight Robbery is the standalone sequel to Hardinge’s debut, Fly By Night; it’s the continued adventures of an orphan girl named Mosca Mye, and her companions, Eponymous Clent (a thief and con artist) and Saracen (a goose whose default temperament is that of the Unseen University Librarian when the latter gets called a monkey). Travelling to the walled town of Toll, the three get caught up in a plot to abduct the mayor’s daughter. But Toll is no ordinary town: inhabitants and citizens alike are classified into ‘day’ and ‘night’ according to the folk deity under whose auspices they were born, and are only allowed to ‘exist’ during the relevant period (the town is even built so that its layout can change from day to night) – and, as story-luck would have it, Mosca and Clent fall on opposite sides of that divide.
For a start, Twilight Robbery is great fun to read: an intriguing plot with considerable momentum (even the many references to past events only make me want to read Fly By Night, rather than leaving me frustrated that I haven’t); and some lovely, rhythmic writing – like this, when Mosca is escaping from capture:
It takes time to find a lantern in the dark, long enough for two quick legs to sprint away into the heaving labyrinth of gorse. It takes time too for sleep-fumbled hands to strike tinder and nursemaid the trembling flame to the wick, long enough for small, cunning hands to snap off a fern-fan the right size to shield a black-haired head from sight. (p. 35)
Mosca Mye is a very appealing character. She’s exceptional in many ways – able to read in a world where many people of her social standing are not; just about the only person in Toll who isn’t charmed by the mayor’s daughter; able to move faster and squeeze into smaller spaces than lumbering adults – and thus a character whom change will follow; this, together with Mosca’s wit and the friction between her and Clent, make her a very engaging figure to read about.
Alongside all its brio, however, there’s a serious heart to Twilight Robbery; Hardinge does not shy away from the harshnesses of life, as shown when Mosca comes across a dead body in a wine cellar:
Mosca stood on the threshold and quivered. She hoped the cask had split. She hoped the darkened pool around the cask was wine. It smelt like wine. She wondered if she would ever be able to bear the smell of wine again. (p. 264)
Perhaps the central issue embodied in Twilight Robbery is that of social segregation; and, of course, Hardinge’s fantasy structure enables her to literalise that concept to an extraordinary degree. My main quibble with the novel has to do with how she handles this. Towards the end, Mosca is frustrated that she can’t do more to help; Clent replies that she has much to learn:
‘Bold actions have consequences, child…To be young is to be powerless, but to have delusions of power. To believe that one can really change things, make the world better and simpler in good and simple ways. To grow old is to realize that nobody is ever good, nothing is ever simple. That truth is cruel at first, but finally comforting.’
‘But…’ Mosca broke in, then halted. Clent was right, she knew that he was. And yet her bones screamed that he was also wrong, utterly wrong. ‘But sometimes things are simple. Just now and then. Just like now and then people are good.’ (pp. 454-5)
I find myself somewhat in sympathy with Clent’s view, here – not that people are never good, but that big issues tend not to have simple solutions. But the world of Twilight Robbery is a larger-than-life one where problems are responsive to bold actions, and a young girl like Mosca Mye can be an agent of change. I suppose this is partly in the nature of children’s literature; but the ending does feel like a disappointing flinch from a book which has not been afraid to be ‘grown up’ when it needed to be.
On balance, though, Twilight Robbery is a book I’m glad to have read, and Frances Hardinge an author I will be reading again in times to come.
Elsewhere
Frances Hardinge’s website
Martin Lewis reviews Twilight Robbery for Strange Horizons
It begins like this:
‘Too old for this shit,’ muttered Craw, wincing at the pain in his dodgy knee with every other step. (p. 9)
As a way of introducing a fantasy adventure novel, this sentence is very efficient: it establishes the narrative tone; it suggests that the characters we’ll follow will not necessarily be in peak physical condition (as is the stereotype); and it highlights that we are going to feel every twinge and scar.
The Heroes chronicles a three-day battle between the forces of the Union and the Northmen (it follows on from Joe Abercrombie’s earlier novels, but I never felt disadvantaged for not having read them); the title refers to a stone circle of strategic importance, but the nature of heroism is also a central concern of the book. It soon becomes clear that there aren’t many obviously ‘heroic’ characters in the cast: Abercrombie’s principal viewpoint characters are Calder, son of a former King of the Northmen, who fights on that side but is a coward only out for his own gain; Bremer dan Gorst, the bloodthirsty royal observer of the war for the Union, who tried out mercy but found it lacking; and Curnden Craw, that old warrior fighting for the Northmen, who believes in standing by his crew and doing the right thing – not that that’s always easy to determine. About the only character who comes close to the typical fantasy ‘hero’ is Whirrun of Bligh, who wields a legendary sword, knows from his goddess the moment and manner of his death, is widely considered mad – and is pretty comprehensively shown over the course of the novel to be misguided. So much for the hero.
The milieu Abercrombie depicts is largely masculine, but there are a few female characters. Of the three main ones, Wonderful, Craw’s second-in-command, and Ishri, the Northmen’s sorceress, never really rise above stereotypes (respectively, the female who’s as much one of the lads as the lads are, and the mysterious exotic); but Finree dan Brock (daughter of the Union forces’ commander-in-chief) is more rounded. She begins as a stereotype herself – the scheming wife of a powerful man (a colonel) – but then Finree comes up against the reality of war, and is changed in a complex way; she doesn’t lose her essential character, but rather the balance of her personality shifts in response to her experiences. Finree becomes more real because she cannot remain a stereotype after all that happens.
The bloody nature of war is emphasised throughout The Heroes, as is the relationship between war and heroism. Whirrun of Bligh might be enthusiastic for the benefits of war (‘This is the thing about war. Forces men to do new things with what they have. Forces them to think new ways. No war, no progress,’ p. 204); but most of the rest of the novel is not, and the possibility of true heroism also seems elusive. ‘A war is no place for heroics,’ (p. 34) comments one character; or consider the following passage, concerning the aftermath of an attack:
Gorst watched the whirling clouds of gnats that haunted the bank, and the corpses floated past beneath them. The bravery. Turning with the current. The honour. Face up and face down. The dedication of the soldiers. One sodden Union hero wallowed to a halt in some rushes, bobbing for a moment on his side. A Northman drifted up, bumped gently into him and carried him from the bank… (p. 222)
There’s some effective juxtaposition of ideal and reality, with an added reminder that those who fall in battle end up the same way, regardless of whose side they are on. Abercrombie’s conflict is one where a man may lose his life to a single arrow that he doesn’t see coming, or even by stepping off the path through a bog. ‘Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill [thinks Gorst]. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.’ (p. 415)
The novel’s view of death and battle is also reflected in its narrative techniques. There’s a very effective chapter in which the viewpoint character of one scene is killed by the viewpoint character of the next. Abercrombie’s battle scenes are vivid, but also bring home the confusion and limited perspective of those involved. There’s also a nice seam of black humour running through the book. But the price of the jokes and the vigorous fight scenes is the suffering which follows, and The Heroes counts the cost of that suffering.
It crossed my mind whilst reading The Heroes just what a broad church fantasy is. We often define ‘fantasy’ by content (quests and magic and battles in an invented world, say), but we can also talk about it terms of affect – that is, stories which create a heightened sense of fantasy, of strangeness. The Heroes is interesting from that latter perspective because it works by stripping away any sense of fantasy – even the few interventions by the novel’s wizard characters are not so much ‘magic’ but artillery. The Heroes is a fantasy of cold, hard reality.
Elsewhere
Joe Abercrombie’s website
Video: Abercrombie reads an extract and is interviewed by his publisher
Some other reviews of The Heroes: Niall Alexander for Strange Horizons; Martin Lewis at Everything Is Nice.
On Thursday night, the good folks of Penguin General (the Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, and Viking imprints) hosted their second annual bloggers’ night, in the 5th View cocktail bar at Waterstones Piccadilly. This event was on a different scale from last year’s, with almost twice as many authors, and quite a few more bloggers – I don’t know if this was the largest-ever gathering of UK book bloggers, but I imagine it must have been close.
I was particularly pleased to get the chance to meet Nat Segnit, whose Pub Walks in Underhill Country was one of my favourite books from last year; he also gave one of the best readings of the night. But all twelve readings were good; so let’s go through them.
***
Naomi Alderman’s new novel is so new that there aren’t any advance copies yet, so she read from her laptop. The Liars’ Gospel is a retelling of the life and death of Jesus; Alderman read from the very beginning, which describes the ritual sacrifice of a lamb – and, if the rest of the book is as well-written as that, it’s one I want to read.
I already had a copy of Jennifer McVeigh’s debut, The Fever Tree, on the TBR pile. It’s set in South Africa in 1880, amid rumours of a smallpox epidemic in the diamond mines. There was some really good use of detail in the domestic scene which McVeigh read, and that bodes well for the rest of the novel.
Have I still never read anything by Marina Lewycka since A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian? (Answer: no, I haven’t.) I should probably rectify that, and Lewycka’s reading from Various Pets Alive and Dead was a good reminder of why. Her extract effectively sketched the four main characters in the novel, and included some sharp description of place.
Next up was Greg Baxter, whose first novel, The Apartment, was the second book from tonight already on my TBR pile. Baxter was a measured, precise reader, which went well with the spare style of his extract. I’m now still further intrigued to read the whole book.
22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson tells of a Polish family reuniting in England after the war. I’m not quite sure whether this is a book for me, but I found the particular extract Hodgkinson read to be a good character sketch.
Now on to the only non-fiction book and author of the evening. The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane is about the ancient paths ofBritain, the stories intertwined in them, and how people have been shaped by them. Macfarlane read an extract concerning an the encounter with Hanging figure by the sculptor Steve Dilworth; fascinating stuff, and definitely a book I’d like to read.
The second half of the evening began with Elif Shafak’s reading from her latest novel, Honour, which focuses on a Kurdish-Turkish family who move toLondon. Shafak read from the beginning of the book, where the daughter of the family prepares to meet her brother on his release from prison (he was convicted for murder). This was a strong set-up for the rest of the novel, and I look forward to reading on.
Set in 19th-centurySomerset, Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk is the account of a girl named Mary, who is sent to work for the local vicar’s wife, where she has good reason to write down what happened to her. Leyshon’s excerpt gave a hint as to what that reason might be, and her reading brought Mary’s character vividly to life.
Then it was Nat Segnit’s turn to read from Pub Walks in Underhill Country – and it was just like discovering the book all over again. Segnit was an excellent reader (an audiobook of this read by him would be wonderful), and the extract he chose hilarious. Seriously, if you have not read this novel, you should.
From a novel I already loved to one of which I’d never even heard. Tom Bullough’s Konstantin is a fictional account of the life of the Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; it was tricky to judge from the reading what the book as a whole might be like, but I started reading it on the train home, and it’s shaping up to be interesting.
The next author to take the stage was Nikita Lalwani, reading from her second novel, The Village. The set-up sounded intriguing – a documentary-maker travels fromEnglandto make a film about an Indian village which is also an open prison – and Lalwani’s reading only confirmed that view.
The evening closed with a reading from a Booker-winning author – James Kelman. Mo said she was quirky is a novel chronicling a day in the life of a single mother; on the evidence of Kelman’s reading, it’s also a novel very concerned with voice – it felt like a novel to be read out loud. I look forward to reading and finding out if that impression is correct.
***
And then, as Joshua Ferris put it, we came to the end. My thanks to everyone involved for such an enjoyable evening.
Congratulations to all writers who have been longlisted for this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction:
Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg (Quercus) – Swedish; 1st Novel
On the Floor by Aifric Campbell (Serpent’s Tail) – Irish; 3rd Novel
The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen (The Clerkenwell Press) – American; 4th Novel
The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue (Picador) – Irish; 7th Novel
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail) – Canadian; 2nd Novel
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (JonathanCape) – Irish; 5th Novel
The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki (Headline Review) – British; 5th Novel
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (Quercus) – American; 4th Novel
Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury) – British; 3rd Novel
Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber) – British; 2nd Novel
The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) – British; 2nd Novel
The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy (JonathanCape) – British; 6th Novel
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker) – American; 1st Novel
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury) – American; 1st Novel
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (Atlantic Books) – American; 7th Novel
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury) – American; 6th Novel
There but for the by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) – British; 5th Novel
The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard (Alma Books) – British; 2nd Novel
Tides of War by Stella Tillyard (Chatto & Windus) – British; 1st Novel
The Submission by Amy Waldman (William Heinemann) – American; 1st Novel
I’m from Yorkshire: it was probably about time I read something by one of the Brontës. So here’s the first novel by the youngest of the sisters, for which Anne drew on her own experiences as a governess.
When her family falls on hard times, cleric’s daughter Agnes Grey – who has so far been sheltered in life by her parents – determines to become a governess, and is excited at the prospect:
How delightful it would be to be a governess! […] And then, how charming to be intrusted with the care and education of children! Whatever others said, I felt I was fully competent to the task…I had but to turn from my little pupils to myself at their age, and I should know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections… (p. 9)
Over the course of the novel, Brontë vividly dismantles these rosy preconceptions. Agnes’s first governess job is teaching the Broomfield children, including seven-year-old Tom, who loves torturing birds; and Mary Ann, who will scream out loud whenever Agnes tries to instil the slightest bit of discipline in her, knowing full well that it will bring Mrs Broomfield running, wondering what is going on. Of course, the parents see nothing of what’s really going on, and place the blame for their children’s poor education squarely on Agnes’s shoulders.
Working for a family of higher social status is no better: theMurrayslikewise take only the most superficial interest in their children’s education, and sideline Agnes. Perhaps the worst of theMurraychildren is Rosalie, a ghastly, vain creature who’s in the process of entering adult society, and revels in her own loveliness:
And now, Miss Grey [says Rosalie], attend to me; I’m going to tell you about the ball. […] There were two noblemen, three baronets, and five titled ladies!—and other ladies and gentlemen innumerable. The ladies, of course, were of no consequence to me, except to put me in a good humour with myself, by showing how ugly and awkward most of them were; and the best, mama told me,–the most transcendent beauties among them, were nothing to me. (p. 75)
Well aware of how attractive she is, Rosalie has no interest in love – she’s determined to marry the local lord, purely for money and prestige, and will happily manipulate others in the pursuit of that aim. Rosalie also has no time for the poor cottagers on the estate (except to the extent that visiting them allows her to massage her own ego). In these characteristics and attitudes, Rosalie stands in contrast with the stoical, moral Agnes, whose attraction to the curate Mr Weston (the only character besides Agnes to look beneath the surface and show concern for the cottagers, and hence her equal in temperament).
One thing that strikes me about the characterisation in Agnes Grey (and I don’t whether this is just me, whether it’s down to the passage of time, or whether it has been the same since Brontë’s day) is that the secondary characters – especially Rosalie Murray and Tom Broomfield – often feel more vivid than Agnes herself, despite her being the narrator. This is effective in terms of those secondary characters – their vividness makes them attractive, but their behaviour does the opposite, which creates a nice tension – but it seems to unbalance the novel as a whole.
Agnes Grey is a strong portrait of its protagonist’s difficulties, and her employers’ attitudes; but I leave it expecting to find stronger works elsewhere in the Brontë sisters’ bibliographies. Which should I read next?
This book fulfils the Classics category of the Mixing It Up Challenge 2012.
This time I’m looking at three recent debut novels.
Harriet Lane, Alys, Always (2012)
Life is not particularly going anywhere for Frances Thorpe – a sub-editor on the literary desk of a London newspaper – until she’s driving home one day after visiting her parents, and comes across a crashed car. She calls the emergency services, but the woman in the car dies at the scene; Frances bears the incident no more mind until she discovers that the dead woman, Alys, was married to a celebrated novelist, Laurence Kyte. When the opportunity arises for Frances (as the last person to be with Alys) to meet the Kyte family, she grabs it eagerly – and she’ll happily twist the truth, if it gets her into their circles.
Alys, Always is a short, snappy read which gains much of its effect from the uncertainty over just how far Frances is prepared to go; even after finishing the book, I can’t decide how much she might have planned or anticipated what happens. In addition to the main thread concerning Frances’s relationship with the Kytes, the newspaper-set scenes are amusingly satirical; and the two come together satisfyingly in the way that Frances’s exaggerations and deceptions mirror (albeit on a larger scale and with more serious consequences) her experiences at work.
Reviews elsewhere: Learn This Phrase; Sheena Joughin for the Telegraph.
Penny Hancock, Tideline (2012)
It starts with a knock on the door: forty-something Sonia welcomes in Jez, her friend Helen’s fifteen-year-old nephew; he’s come to borrow a CD, but Sonia has other ideas – she is infatuated with Jez, spikes his drink to make him pass out, then resolves to keep him hidden away for herself.
Tideline stands or falls first of all on its ability to convince that Sonia could realistically hold Jez captive for several days; and it does so – Jez is a trusting boy with a protected existence; Sonia repeatedly feeds him her mother’s sleeping pills – the situation is unlikely, but Sonia is able to get away with it for precisely that reason. Penny Hancock also constructs believable reasons for Sonia’s behaviour: we see that the protagonist views Jez as a replacement for both Seb (a boy with whom she was smitten as a teenager) and her grown-up daughter, Kit.
With the situation thus established, the tension ratchets up, as Sonia resorts to ever more desperate measures to retain control. The status quo can’t last, of course; but exactly how and when circumstances will change is uncertain, and the journey to that point (and beyond) is thrilling.
Reviews elsewhere: Milo’s Rambles; Books and Writers.
Terri Armstrong, Standing Water (2012)
When his mother dies, Dom Connor returns to Australia, where he faces an awkward reunion with his brother Neal (who stayed on the family farm, and whose physicality stands in sharp contrast to the more intellectual Dom), and Neal’s wife Hester (a city girl who seems to Dom an unlikely match for her husband, though she has her reasons for being and staying with him). Shortly after, along comes Dom’s childhood friend Andy Bohan, a junkie who has left the city determined to get clean – and so begins the transformation of their lives.
Armstrong makes good use of setting in Standing Water, evoking the harshness of the landscape, and using the decline of Dom’s home town to reflect the state of the characters’ relationships. The author also observes clearly how her characters change: all three protagonists (Dom, Hester, and Andy) must reach beyond themselves to move their lives on.
The publisher, Pewter Rose Press
Reviews elsewhere: Louise Laurie for The Bookbag; BooksPlease.
I never had Lonely Planet down as a publisher of fiction, but here is an anthology of science fiction travel stories published by them. I bought it in a book sale some years ago, and recently came across it again on my shelves; I thought it would be fun to read as a story-by-story review project, so here’s what Damien Broderick selected:
Lisa Goldstein, ‘Tourists’
Greg Egan, ‘Yeyuka’
Brian W. Aldiss, ‘The Difficulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica’
Gene Wolfe, ‘Seven American Nights’
Stephen Dedman, ‘Tourist Trade’
John Varley, ‘In the Bowl’
Garry Kilworth, ‘Let’s Go to Golgotha!’
Joanna Russ, ‘Useful Phrases for the Tourist’
Robert Silverberg, ‘Trips’
Paul J. McAuley, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’
The titles above will become links to my review posts as we go on. Let the journey begin!
The narrator of Julie Otsuka’s second novel is a chorus: the disembodied ‘we’ of a cohort of Japanese women who travel to the United States at the start of the twentieth century as picture brides; the book follows them from their initial sea voyage through to their being sent away to internment during the Second World War. A quotation from the first chapter illustrates Otsuka’s general approach:
On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had originally been sent. We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.
This is the language of The Buddha in the Attic: individual details and experiences, blended and distilled into a rhythmic composite. That quotation also hints at the hope which their husbands-to-be and journey to America represent to these women – a hope soon tarnished when they discover that the photographs they were given are twenty years old, and that their new husbands are not the well-off professionals which the women were led to believe, but farm-workers and servants. This is the first example in the novel of the American dream not living up to its promise for the women.
Once their new lives in America begin, the women’s experiences are varied, but most find themselves marginalised or ignored. This is where Otsuka’s main technique comes into its own, as the author creates a broad, sweeping portrait of many lives which can at once move out to reveal common themes and move in to focus on individuals.
When the women come to have children, The Buddha in the Attic gains a new layer in the ways that the new generation’s lives reflect and differ from those of their mothers. Where the women once imagined whatAmerica might be like, now their children have notions of the outside world based on hearsay, which may or may not be accurate (“Beyond the farm, they’d heard, wherever you went you were always a stranger and if you got on the wrong bus by mistake you might never find your way home”). As life goes on, some of the children get a taste of the American dream which was denied their mothers – but not necessarily as the women may have wished, because the children tend to reject or forget their Japanese names and traditions.
Life turns again with the advent of Pearl Harbor, as the women now find themselves and their families regarded with suspicion. Hearsay returns again in the form of a ‘list’ of people to be taken away, about which nothing is known for sure (including whether or not it actually exists), but much supposed. Otsuka builds tension effectively in this section, as the details which have so far formed the basis of the women’s experiences give way to questions and rumours.
Otsuka’s first-person-plural narrative voice may speak for all the women at once, but, to an extent, it also speaks for none of them, as we hear no direct individual testimony. There are occasional references to characters by name throughout the novel, but it’s not until towards the end that we get to perceive them as individuals en masse, as it were – but, by then, the Japanese are leaving their communities, and soon all that will remain of them are vague memories, and the odd physical trace like the brass Buddha which one woman leaves behind. The voice of the chorus falls silent, but the music of Otsuka’s writing rings on beyond the final page.
Robert Shearman returns with the follow-up to his British Fantasy Award-winning collection Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, and once again, he’s put together a superb volume of stories. As before, he’s adept at combining the outlandishly fantastical with the minutiae of everyday life and relationships; but, whereas the main theme of his previous collection was love, here Shearman is broadly concerned with the relationship between individuals and the grand sweep of history.
Separating the main stories is a chart of dates, a “history of mediocrity, and futility, and human error”, to quote its unnamed compiler in one of his asides. The reasons behind this chronicle’s existence are revealed only gradually, as Shearman depicts a man who has been burnt by life, found that even the history he loved as a child now seems hollow, and he and his family have paid a heavy price. For this narrator, history has become nothing but “memories [and] interpretations”; a similar view is expressed by the protagonist of ‘A History of Broken Things’, who intersperses recollections of his past with reflections on his mother’s decline from dementia, whether history is nothing but our memories, and what that means if we forget or are forgotten.
One could take from this the view that individuals are insignificant in the face of history and loss, but that’s not the impression I gain from Everyone’s Just So So Special – at least, not entirely. It seems to me that individuals are central to many of these stories, even in some cases warping reality around themselves. For example, ‘Coming in to Land’ is presented as a flight attendant’s address to her passengers, insisting that they have to believe in Paris for it to be there when they land’; but it’s clear by story’s end that this is all about the attendant and her ex-lover. In ‘This Far, and No Further’, time literally stops from the strength of Polly’s desire to find her missing daughter – but there are a number of perceptual shifts which poignantly reveal her true state of mind.
Several other pieces in the collection also use a strange situation to illuminate character traits. The story ‘Dirt’ is a particularly striking example: Duncan Brown is a university lecturer having an affair with a student from another faculty, who calls herself Natasha and is obsessed with Russia (or her mental image of the place), and even keeps a bag of Russian soil under her pillow. Natasha’s fascination comes across as the rather eccentric fad of a teenager still shaping her own identity; it only takes the innocent action ofDuncansending her a postcard fromRussiato undermine what the country represents to her. But a neat narrative move at the end gives cause to question whether it’s Natasha or Duncan who has the more tenuous hold on reality.
One of the hallmarks of Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical for me was the way that Shearman often used the fantastic to facilitate equally satisfying literal and metaphorical readings of his stories. We can see a similar approach in some of the tales in the current volume. ‘Inkblots’, for example, quickly skates over the implausibility of there being such a thing as a “hospital tattooist” to produce a poignant reflection on declaring one’s feelings when they might change. Sam’s father and terminally-ill mother decide it’s time to get tattoos of each other’s names, and would like Sam to have one with both of their names; but he’s not keen on the permanence of a tattoo. Then Sam’s mother doesn’t die after all, and his parents drift apart; Shearman explores the ramifications of such a development in a situation where a tattoo effectively represents a declaration of undying love. In tandem with this, we see Sam’s own unease with the idea of love and commitment, represented by his squeamishness around tattoos.
However, it seems to me that the richest stories in Everyone’s Just So So Special go beyond straightforwardly metaphorical readings, into the deeper heart of fantasy. The protagonist of ‘Times Table’ literally sheds her skin with each new birthday, but the remains hang around as living puppets. The story portrays the protagonist at various stages in her life, from the fourteen-year-old girl taking her teenage insecurities out on the younger self who wasn’t the girl she now wishes she could have been; to the old, old woman surrounded by the ghosts of her past. To an extent, ‘Times Table’ is about who we are as people, and the changing nature of self; but the sheer range that it encompasses makes the story greater than the sum of its parts.
In ‘Restoration’, a figure known only as “the Curator” has conquered the universe, and each year of history is now a mural in his vast gallery. Andy gets a job at the gallery, and is particularly taken with both 1574 and his boss, Miriam – that’s the name she takes, anyway; she’s forgotten her own. And Miriam is not the forgetful one, as Andy too sometimes finds her slipping from his memory; but a new directive from the Curator forces the two of them to take drastic action. ‘Restoration’ is a slice of beautiful strangeness that works by remaining focused on the characters at its heart; even when the world we know has been utterly swept away, we can recognise the people.
So who actually is special, in the face of all that was, is, or might be? Perhaps the story ‘Acronyms’ offers a clue in its portraits of interlocking (though separate) lives, beginning with a café-owner who makes the finest BLT sandwich and heading towards an outlandish tale of spying. Everyone is special in their own stories, but those stories may be only tangential to each other. Shearman’s collection, however, certainly is special.
(This review also appears in issue 269 of Vector.)
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